Map of North American Internet
john posted in technologies on March 23rd, 2006
A really interesting piece appeared on the 17th by Ben Worthen in CIO blog. He investigates who owns the North American Internet backbone. Instead of a few dry numbers, he got a friend at Lumeta to build a map of the backbone routers organized in colors by ownership.
Map of North American Internet by Lumeta
The map, credited to Ben Cheswick, is wonderful. It can be downloaded as a 36″ x 40″ pdf, which is very slow to display, but worth it. If you zoom in, you can see the router addresses.
The news is not too bad, Verizon and AT&T don’t seem to own a controlling share, yet. Both companies have been making ugly noises lately about controlling the data that flows across their networks. This would be roughly like AT&T monitoring your phone calls for priority and, maybe one day, content. More corporate Stalinism is not what the world needs, but we may not be in danger. Several times before the Big Suits at Baby Bells have talked about tollbooths on the Internet, only to be stampeded by reality.
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